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Pain management apps

Anyone who suffers from chronic pain knows that physicians recommend keeping a journal or diary of pain symptoms: How bad is it over a day or week? What triggers it or makes it worse? Is it affected by weather, exercise, foods, stress? What makes it better? What medications have you tried, when and for how long?

There is a huge potential market for these apps: Some 100 million American adults are affected by chronic pain, and the condition costs the United States $635 billion each year, according to a 2012 estimate published in The Journal of Pain. If apps can streamline communication between patients and doctors and help bring hard data to treatment decisions, they might be a huge boon to the health care system.

Their two top choices, one paid and one free, are:

My Pain Diary: Chronic Pain & Symptom Tracker ($4.99)

Customizable, color-coded labels help sort the entries into categories by type or location, and users can also create their own pain-measuring metrics. The History screen provides good at-a-glance information, and there is a wide variety of customizable graphing options for analyzing the data.

Catch My Pain: Pain Diary & Community (free)

The feature that sets Catch My Pain apart from other apps is its active and supportive forums. This social aspect is missing from the other apps we tested, and it may be clinically important. A 2008 study in The Journal of Pain, for example, found that chronic-pain patients who feel socially supported may have fewer signs of depression, and may even feel that their pain is less intense, compared with those who don’t feel supported.